Director's Cut: Destroyer: "Kaputt"

From a-ha's "Take on Me" to the Cure's "Close to Me", great music videos are bursts of sound and vision that leave an indelible impression. Director's Cut is a Pitchfork News feature in which we chat with music video directors about their creations. The men and women behind the camera are often overlooked in today's YouTube era, but this feature aims to highlight their hard work while showcasing the best videos currently linking around the Internet. A little behind-the-scenes dirt couldn't hurt, too.

The playful and fantastical video for the title track from Destroyer's new album Kaputt marks a couple of firsts. Fifteen years after Destroyer's debut album, "Kaputt" is the first music video for both the Dan Bejar-led project and its director, Dawn Garcia. The clip isn't bad for a bunch of newbies. In fact, most bands and directors can go whole careers without producing something as winningly imaginative as what these folks came up with.

The video features three distinct story lines, starring a computer nerd, a desperate old man, and a flying whale. The visuals match the song's misty sway and mysterious pull, comfortably residing in the beatific realm between dreams and reality. We spoke with Garcia about80s videos, hot babysitters, and more. Read the Q&A and watch the video below:

Destroyer: "Kaputt" [Director: Dawn Garcia]

Pitchfork: This video does a great job of being both abstract and narrative, which can be a tough balance.

Dawn Garcia: Dan [Bejar] wanted it to be filmic and have a story, so I really focused on making a crazy, entertaining narrative. When I heard the song I felt like it was about this idea of dissipating fantasies. And the music sounded very 80s to me-- when MTV first came out, I was young and every single music video was so exciting. There were no rules and everything seemed really out there. If I were a director in the 80s and someone gave me money to make a music video, this is my fantasy of what it would look like.

Pitchfork: What are some 80s videos that made an impression on you?

DG: Really cheesy stuff like "Take on Me" or even Billy Joel. When you're a kid, you think that they're trying to tell you a secret message-- you can feel that there's some special meaning. But I don't get that feeling when I watch most videos now.

Pitchfork: As far as the video's narrative, what's the thread connecting its three settings?

DG: Well, everyone I've shown it to has a different way of analyzing it. They're like, "Is the old man the kid when he's older?" or, "Is the mom warning him that 'this is going to happen to you'?" All of those explanations are kind of right because I didn't really think too specifically, but I did want the three scenes to represent different ways we fantasize about things: a boy fantasizing about women, that total Bugs Bunny thing of a thirsty man crawling through the desert and seeing a mirage, and then a flying dream. And I thought, "Who gets to fly the least?" And I really like blue whales. I actually thought of a rock first, but that would have just been too weird.

Pitchfork: That kid at the beginning of the video is great, how did you find him?

DG: I did a small casting call. His name is Vantzi Vassilev and he's Eastern European-- he has an accent. I told him, "I want you to pretend like you're in a hip-hop video." I was so surprised because he did it better than I ever could have imagined.

I was trying to cast in such a way that, during the fantasies, there was some sort of odd feeling that something wasn't right. Like, all the people singing and dancing in the desert are men. And, with the girls in the first part, I picked young actresses that looked more like baby sitters than models-- someone a 12-year-old boy would really come into contact with and have a crush on.